The HHS FY 2017 budget request for the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT (ONC) is $82 million, $22 million above FY 2016. In FY 2017, ONC will focus on encouraging market transparency and competition, improving electronic health record usability, offering technical assistance to providers, support the prescription drug monitoring program, and support electronic prescribing of controlled substances.
The budget request for the HHS cybersecurity program includes $51 million to purchase technology but also to improve efficiencies in security tools and develop tools to lessen HHS vulnerability against cybersecurity.
The NIH budget request provides $33.1 billion including $1.8 billion in new mandatory funding to support biomedical research at NIH. The funding would provide almost 10,000 new and competing NIH grants to help scientists better understand the biological mechanisms that underpin health and disease.
The budget provides HHS $309 million to continue scaling up the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). This includes $300 million for NIH to develop a research cohort of a million or more individuals to gather data on the interplay of environmental exposures, physical parameters, and genetic information. The PMI plans to use mobile health technology to correlate activities, develop physiological measures, and determine environmental exposures
The FY 2017 budget request includes $4 million for FDA to develop the regulatory pathways for new medical technologies developed through PMI. ONC would receive $5 million to support PMI by pursuing a portfolio of standards and technology activities to develop interoperable and secure health data exchange systems.
The budget for the Vice President’s Cancer Moonshot research program requests $680 million to expand clinical trials for health disparity populations, pursue new vaccine technology, and fund more cancer research.
The Cancer Moonshot program promotes enhanced data sharing and encourages the development of new tools to leverage knowledge on genomic abnormalities as well as responses to treatments and long term outcomes. The funding would help set up an Oncology Center of Excellence to combine the skills of regulatory scientists with expertise in drugs, biologics, and devices.
The cancer research budget request also includes $75 million for FDA to develop the regulatory pathways for new technologies, ensure quality systems for trials, and facilitate the sharing of data across government, academia, and industry.
The budget would provide $195 million within NIH for the BRAIN initiative. This research would help to discover underlying pathologies in a vast array of brain disorders and provide for new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent common conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, depression, schizophrenia, and addiction.
In FY 2017, the funds for the BRAIN Initiative would support basic neuroscience research, human neuroscience, neuroimaging, and training initiatives, as well as develop potential collaborative projects with industry. These projects would include testing novel devices in the human brain, find new ways to address big data, and develop devices for mapping and tuning brain circuitry.
CMS FY 2017 estimated funding would enable Medicare Advantage organizations to deliver medical services via telehealth especially to rural health clinics and FQHCs by eliminating the applicable Part B requirement that certain covered services be provided exclusively through face-to-face encounters. The decision to use the telehealth benefit would remain at the discretion of the beneficiary.
CMS plans to add certain behavioral health providers to the EHR incentive program to include psychiatric hospitals, community mental health centers, residential and outpatient mental health facilities, and substance use disorder treatment clinics and psychologists.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) budget request includes $23 million, an increase of $1 million above FY 2016 for the AHRQ health IT research portfolio. AHRQ supports research grants to build knowledge to develop tools, help stakeholders implement best practices, and disseminate evidence on the safe and meaningful use of health IT.
The Indian Health Service (IHS) with FY 17 budget request of $6.6 billion would use part of the funding to support the IHS health IT systems used in over 400 facilities across 35 states at the point-of-care.
Go to www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/Fy2017-budget-in-brief.pdf for more information.